Yo, all!
I've noticed lately that there seems to be quite a few -- yay, a veritable plethora of -- television shows dealing with supernatural/paranormal phenomena. For example, you have Ghost Hunters (two Roto-Router plumbers and friends travel the US in black vans, looking for scientific evidence of spookyness) and its two spinoffs, Ghost Hunters International (plumbers in Europe!) and UFO Hunters (hasn't aired yet but a guess: plumbers and little green men?). Then there's Paranormal State (i.e. a bunch of Penn State students go looking for Casper while wearing trench coats and talking importantly into digital recorders), A Haunting (possessions, possessions, possessions and, for the grand finale ... possessions) and of course, my eternal favorite, Scariest Places on Earth (narrated by Poltergeist's marvelous Zelda "This House is Clean" Rubenstein). And of course, there are other paranormal-based reality shows as well: MTV's Fear, Celebrity Paranormal Project, etc.
Now you know I love this stuff. October is my favorite month. J and I are total freaks about Halloween (Barrys' Boneyard forever, y'all!) and we like nothing more than to cuddle up on the couch under a nice warm blanket, a fire in the woodstove and a classic horror movie (for my money, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein is the all-time winner) on the tube. And in the spirit (haha) of full disclosure, I admit that I do believe that there's more out there than science and the human intellect can prove -- in other words, "There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy."
That said, I sincerely worry about these little guys who run around playing with evil spirits. They dress up in their black clothes and get their tape recorders (sorry, "EVP Recorders") and run about taunting "evil" and begging for a whoopin'. And I worry about the rest of us who watch these shows hoping that the spirits (ghosts? The devil? God? Anyone?) GIVE them that whoopin'. Because isn't that why we watch these shows? Let's face it: it's not really about "science" or "learning" or "broadening one's mind" at all. No, we watch because it's fun to watch people do stupid things when they are essentially wetting themselves with fear. And if he or she gets their heiney kicked in the meantime? Bonus. We enjoy seeing others blindly flail down dark and dusty hallways, whites of eye rolling back in their heads, as we (from our positions on our couches, sipping cocoa with those little marshmallows) cluck and shake our heads in a superior, knowing fashion. And of course ...
We watch because, in the end, we're just happy that isn't us.
Oh, as a culture we do enjoy being scared. But we like our fright in small, managable doses -- for example, a 90-minute adventure in scare cinema or a 15-minute stroll through a cheesy Halloween "haunted" house. We like that because we still challenge the nightmare, but we're in a controlled environment and know that the end of the experience is imminent. We get to face what's under the bed and be guaranteed a win -- but it's a domesticated demon, the boogeyman on a tight leash: the spookster equivillent to boxing the trained bear. The television shows we now seem to crave feature people facing the darkness without a net and we get our vicarious tingles by watching them take the risks that we're too smart/scared/etc. to take ourselves. I wonder, though, at what price this passive thrill? Are we losing connection to some primal force that we really need to experience personally in order to understand and treat it with the reverence/awe/fear it deserves?
Who knows, really. In the meantime, I should really go -- there's a Haunted Hotels marathon on the Travel Channel I just don't want to miss.
** Image courtesy http://tracosetrocos.files.wordpress.com/2006/10/if_ghost.jpg
1 comment:
First, people seem to be drawn to believe in something beyond their capacity to directly understand. Why is it every major human civilization found religion of some form or other? We try to make sense of the universe, to put the pieces together. The ant is trying to understand the playground. It's just not possible from the ant's perspective, so we make some educated (or uneducated) guesses. I suspect this phenomenon you observe is merely postmodern humanity's latest attempt to commercialize it.
Second, it's pretty amazing what people are willing to believe when they knowingly enter a highly suggestive environment.
Third, it's even more amazing what fewer will believe on a network that has the word "Fiction" in their name (or at least its abbreviation) ... not that any Foot readers or writers would fall into this category ...
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